We encourage power supply designers to comment on the latest specifications for the purpose of making more clear some aspects of the new specifications and also for feedback to the competition organizers, feedback that might be used for future updates of the competition specifications.

Little Box Challenge competition organizers released a new set of requirements that relaxed the ground leakage current by an order of magnitude! With less than a month away from the technical submission deadline!

It doesn't look good for the teams that worked hard to meet the 5mA requirements. The situation is now that an inferior, less challenging technical approach having 49.99mA ground current could win the competition. In the same time, a team achieving the previous <5mA requirements through more innovation and clever design, could loose. On top of not winning the prize, their superior technical approach could be made public for anybody to see and eventually copy. It defeats the original competition's goal of promoting the most innovating and clever solution for a residential/home solar inverter.

Those teams that were able to achieve <5mA for the ground current, they might consider alternative ways of promoting their efforts. If the teams believe they have a good competitive design, why not dropping from the competition, do not make public their innovating solutions, find ways to protect their IP, and move on to productize the prototype and plan to sell a solar inverter based on the prototype they might have already?